Open Access Week Tidbits

It’s not actually a holiday, but for me Open Access Week seems more exciting than ever this year. There’s lots going on during this 5th annual international advocacy event, which runs from October 24-30. Here are a few highlights:

Kicking things off last week, John Dupuis over at Confessions of a Science Librarian blogged about one strategy that researchers can use to regain control of their scholarly communications: blogging. (I’m not entirely sure, but I believe this was the first use of the #occupyscholcomm hashtag, which continues in heavy rotation on Twitter this week.)

In her column over at Inside Higher Ed, our own Barbara Fister shares the gory details of the price increases for her library’s subscriptions to ACS and Sage journal packages. And she’s not the only one — others are taking up the call to make the rapidly increasing price tags for scholarly communication public. So many of our colleagues outside of the library are still unaware of these high and growing prices, and sharing this information is vital to our advocacy for open access.

Alex Holcombe, a Psychologist at the University of Sydney, has created a lovely, simple way for faculty and researchers to demonstrate their open access advocacy: the Open Access Pledge. Holcombe’s pledge calls for scholars to commit to doing peer review primarily (though not exclusively) for open access publications (both gold and green). It’s a simple pledge that calls on us to recognize that our volunteer peer review efforts have an impact on the economics of scholarly publishing, and we can use our labor to help address the disparities in access to research and scholarship.

Last but certainly not least: a little humor always makes difficult discussions easier, even discussions about the frustrations and challenges of scholarly communication. So if you’re on Twitter you should most definitely follow @OpenAccessHulk, who will SMASH TOLL ACCESS PUBLISHING.